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Merrell Publishers is always on the lookout for the quirky, unusual story
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that incites the reader to say, "What a great idea for a book." A new release, Missing Masterpieces, does just that. Gert-Rudolf Flick, an Old Master–paintings collector and lawyer, painstakingly has researched the fate of 24 missing works of art, such as the bronze of Michelangelo's David, which was last seen at a chateau in France before its aristocratic owner was beheaded. During Flick's exhaustive investigations, the subjects of several planned chapters, including a Gainsborough landscape and two statues, suddenly re-surfaced on the cover of an auction catalogue after having been missing for a century. Interestingly, Flick concludes that a work of art that goes missing usually is just miscatalogued or misattributed. For instance, a painting of The Supper at Emmaus hanging in a Venetian chapel since 1534 was recently discovered to be by Vittorio Carpaccio—and no one had noticed!
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January 2003
